Master of the Crossroads

by Madison Smartt Bell

  “Sir, I did not. I made two treaties with the English, and strictly to arrange terms for their departure from Saint Domingue.”

  “The English suggested that you yourself might place the colony under protection of their crown.”

  Toussaint inclined his head.

  “You entertained those proposals with a certain favor.”

  “Oh,” said Toussaint. “There were some agents of the English who tried to place that idea in my head. I amused myself by making fun of them.”

  “And at the same time you accepted their gifts.”

  Toussaint let out a whispering laugh. “I had no gifts from the English.” He considered. “I had some twenty barrels of powder from General Maitland, but nothing more.”

  Both men were silent while the castle clock tolled the hour.

  “Yes,” Toussaint said, “and once General Maitland presented me with a saddle and trappings for my horse, which I at first refused. But when pressed to accept it as a token from himself, rather than his government, I did so.”

  “Commendable,” Caffarelli said drily, but Toussaint did not react to the prick.

  “And your secret treaty, signed with Maitland. What were its terms?”

  “I have already told you.”

  “You have not told all.”

  “I agreed not to attack the English at Jamaica,” Toussaint said with an air of fatigue. “The English were to have the right to enter the ports at Le Cap and Port-au-Prince, but no other. They promised not to molest the ships of the French Republic in the coastal waters of Saint Domingue.”

  Caffarelli affected a sigh.

  “Not all the English officers kept the bargain,” Toussaint said irritably. “Their corsairs took four of our ships after it was signed. That was done by Admiral Farker and the governor of Jamaica, who complained that Maitland had let himself be deceived by a Negro.”

  “As perhaps he had,” said Caffarelli.

  Again Toussaint declined to react.

  “And the other terms of the secret treaty?”

  “I have already told you.”

  The castle bells rang two more times while the conversation continued to follow these same circular pathways. In the intervals, the ticking of Toussaint’s watch buried in his clothes was just barely audible. The damp seeped glossily on the inner wall. Caffarelli veered to a new subject.

  “And the treasure that you hid in Saint Domingue. Spirited away from the coffers of the French Republic.”

  Toussaint clicked his tongue. “The government treasury was reduced by the wars. I had no fortune, not in money. I spent what I had on the same cause, and the rest of my property was in land. There is Habitation d’Héricourt, near Le Cap, and at Ennery three plantations which I bought from the colons and joined together. Also Habitation Rousinière, which is the property of my wife. On the Spanish side of the island I had land where I raised livestock for the army.”

  “You sent a ship to the North American Republic, loaded with gold and precious things, and your aide-de-camp who conducted the cargo was shot when he returned.”

  Toussaint ran his tongue around the loose teeth at the front of his jaw. “It is true that I ordered the man shot, but that was because he had tried to debauch some young women of my household.” He paused. “All you white men are always dreaming of gold in the mountains of Saint Domingue. There was gold once, but the Spaniards took it all away a very long time ago.”

  “Then what of the six men who went out from Le Cap to bury your treasure in the mountains, and who were shot on their return?”

  Toussaint’s heels cracked against the concrete floor, and his eyes grew round and white as he surged against the edge of the table. “That is a lie! A calumny, sir, which my enemies invented to dishonor me. They said I had killed men from my own guard on such a mission, but I called out my guard to prove the lie, and all were present. I would not put the shame of such an act upon my spirit.”

  “No,” said Caffarelli softly. “No, perhaps you would not.”

  Toussaint subsided. Caffarelli produced his own watch and examined its face. The cry of a circling hawk came toward them distantly from the chasm opposite the cell of Berthe de Joux.

  “I will leave you, for a time, to rest,” Caffarelli said. “I will return this afternoon.”

  In Saint Domingue, Toussaint had never formed the habit of the midday siesta, which all who were able to do so practiced. But his secretaries could not work effectively during those hours; stunned by the heat, they spoiled their pages. Toussaint did not stop, but he slowed down, as a reptile might, his eyes half lidded, his body at rest, his mind in slow motion. Many notions and strategies unfolded in his head, and if something shifted in the terrain before his eye, he was aware of it.

  Now, as he lay still, fully clothed under a blanket, with his arms folded across his breastbone, it was more difficult for him to enter this state, because of the cold. He could feel something in Caffarelli’s intention reaching toward him, but he could not make out exactly what it was.

  The cry of the mountain hawks around the castle had not given Caffarelli the idea itself so much as the language for it. It was, he thought, probably his best hope, if not his last.

  He returned to Toussaint’s cell in the afternoon, and for some two hours allowed the conversation to wander in the same circles as it had before. When he again raised the issue of the murdered men who were supposed to have hidden treasure, Toussaint’s flicker of resentment was slighter than it had been earlier. But it was there, and Caffarelli pressed.

  “General, you are not putting the truth of yourself into what you tell me. Does not that dishonor your spirit most of all? You give me the answers a slave would make, but you were no slave in Saint Domingue. Your constitution was a declaration of independence in everything but name. You were a rebel, and a proud one! You were an eagle—why pretend to be a duck? Tell me, tell the First Consul—tell the world how it really was.”

  Toussaint rose up. He did so without moving, but the sudden ferocity of his concentration pressed Caffarelli back in his chair. For a moment he forgot that Toussaint was the prisoner and he was not. As he regained his sense of the true situation, he thought with a burst of excitement that he had won, but the moment passed. Toussaint shrank, his whole body slackened. He looked away as he began to speak, returning to that same circle of evasions he had always made before.

  Part Four

  THE WAR OF KNIVES 1799–1801

  Si ou mouri, ou gen tò. . . .

  —Haitian proverb

  If you’re dead, you’re wrong. . . .

  By the fall of 1798, Toussaint Louverture had seen the departures of three white representatives of the French Republic: Laveaux, Sonthonax, and Hédouville. His enemies claimed he had engineered these departures in order to extend his own power in the colony. Toussaint, however, always maintained his loyalty to France, where he had sent his two eldest sons for their education. He had certainly declined an offer of British support, tendered by General Maitland, in setting up Saint Domingue as an independent state, perhaps with himself as its king.

  One official French agent still remained on the island, Roume, an elderly Creole from Grenada who had been part of various French commissions since the first slave rebellion in 1791, and who had represented the French interest in Spanish Santo Domingo since the signing of the Treaty of Basel. Toussaint now invited Roume to return to French Saint Domingue in the role of French commissioner, though his enemies claimed he did so only to give a shading of legitimacy to his own enterprise of setting up an essentially independent government.

  By 1799, Toussaint’s most powerful enemy on the island was a recent ally, General Antoine Rigaud. During the repulse of the British invasion, Rigaud, a native of Les Cayes on the southern peninsula, had emerged as the principal leader of the colored minority, just as Toussaint emerged as the principal leader of the black majority. Rigaud and Toussaint might have come to blows eventually because of racial politics, but their conflict was
accelerated and exacerbated by Agent Hédouville’s parting gesture: he formally instructed Rigaud to disregard Toussaint’s authority.

  31

  It was strange, because he was a blanc, while I, Riau, was fils Ginen, how sometimes I would feel myself to be walking in the same spirit with Doctor Antoine Hébert. I felt so very much that day at La Fossette, when he would not kill Choufleur, although he could have killed him easily, and with less danger to himself than it cost him not to do it. That was not because I wanted Choufleur to keep his feet walking on our earth, because he was a dangerous man who was sure to cause more trouble. It would be for the better if someone did kill him, but the doctor chose not to do it, and Riau was glad, and even the Captain Maillart felt that same harmony that was among all three of us as we came riding out of the swamp with its rotting smell of graves, the sun shining down on our backs in its rising out of the sea.

  After this thing had happened I thought I would ask the doctor to be parrain to the child who had two fathers, when that child would be brought to the water of the whiteman’s church. It seemed to me that Guiaou would be for this idea as well because he had also worked with the doctor in healing, and with Riau too, and I did not think Merbillay would be against it. But none of us were able to go Ennery then, but instead we were all sent here or there all over the northern plain.

  Hédouville had been driven away, and Toussaint sent a long letter after him to the masters of France, saying he had not meant to chase their agent from the country, whatever Hédouville claimed himself, and still there was no one above Toussaint after Hédouville had left, except for Roume, across the Spanish border. Also there was Rigaud in the south, but no one yet knew what he would do, and there were many mountains between him and Toussaint. In the north was peace, but Toussaint made himself very busy getting ready for more war, and he seemed to think that this war would come in French ships from over the sea, no matter what letters he sent.

  War wants guns, and guns want money, and money wanted sugar and coffee to be brought out of the trees and the cane fields. For that, more of the grand blancs were coming back all the time, after Hédouville had gone. They agreed with Toussaint, now, even better than with the French, and that hurt the confidence that some felt in Toussaint, especially with Moyse, and a few others. I, Riau, I was doubtful too, although I kept the doubt hidden behind my head. I saw many of Toussaint’s letters and the letters which came to him, so I thought he was right that the war was not finished yet, and I knew we would need more guns, with powder and bullets to feed them.

  For that, it happened that Captain Riau was sent with men to bring Michel Arnaud to his plantation on the plain again, with his wife who served the mysteries, because they had run away again from that place when the rising against Hédouville happened, and they did not know what they would find when they came back—if the place had been burned again or not, or if the people of the hoe there would have stayed. The doctor came with them also, to begin a hospital there for people who were sick or hurt. He had said to Arnaud that if he cared for the sick ones on his plantation, that would be a protection for himself, because people would return the good he did for them. Arnaud seemed to listen to this, although I thought it was against what was truly in him. No one was more savage to our people than Arnaud before the slaves broke off their chains.

  But when we did come to Habitation Arnaud, the people had not burned the cane fields. The mill had been only partly rebuilt since they had knocked it down the first time, but they had not knocked down that part which had been raised again. And the people had stayed there instead of running away, in their cases around the borders of the cane pieces. The people seemed quiet to me, too quiet, and they turned their faces from us and lowered their heads when we came riding up that allée of stumps which led to the main compound.

  Arnaud was happy—one could see his head lift up and his spine unkink itself—because he had expected it all to be destroyed. As for his woman, when she stepped down into the yard, she turned her head around and around like an owl, looking for that shed which was no longer there, and when her eyes found the burned patch where it had been, they rolled back white, and she fell away from herself toward the ground, but Arnaud came quickly and caught her up. The people of that place were watching from the hedges to see if the loa would rise up in her body, but she had only fainted, and Arnaud carried her into the house.

  I, Riau, I had not seen the burning of the shed, but I had heard about it from the doctor and also from Flaville, and I knew what was in the shed before it had been burnt.

  We stayed at Habitation Arnaud for eight days. As Captain, Riau might have slept in the grand’case with the doctor and the other blancs. Arnaud invited me to sleep there, but I did not want to stay in his house. Bouquart found a case down below the cane mill, and I went there at night to stay with him. In the day, I worked with the doctor and some of the men Arnaud had called in from the cane fields or the mill to help with raising the hospital. His woman Claudine came out then, and took an interest in what we would do; she asked for a brush arbor to be raised next to the room which would be for the hospital, where she might teach the children of those who worked the fields. Arnaud ordered this done to please her. All the time she walked high on her toes like a cat trying to cross water. It appeared that she was meant to stand over the leaf women who would tend the hospital, and the doctor taught her certain things to do. She was slow, but willing when she did these things, and she had a gentle touch. The children were drawn by this softness in her, so that they came willingly to the brush arbor when it was made to learn the letters in her book. Yet I wondered if this gentleness was really her own.

  Arnaud thought it wasteful, this business of teaching the children. He said nothing, but his thought showed in the curl of his lip. He was suspicious of the hospital too, and so were the people who worked his fields. In the old days Arnaud had given himself to wounding, not healing. There was no great illness, and no one was badly hurt while we stayed there, but some of the men came to the hospital with the ordinary cuts on their hands and faces from the cane leaves. Claudine and the leaf women poulticed their cuts with gueri trop vite, so that they healed more quickly.

  But one day there came to the hospital a runaway who had been caught by the maréchaussée and brought back to Arnaud during slavery time. She was an old woman now, or looked to be so. She did not come right into the hospital, but remained standing at the edge of the bush, with her breasts hanging slack against her ribs and the stumps where her hands were held up before her. Arnaud had cut off her hands as a punishment, when the maréchaussée brought her back to him. There was nothing to be done about it now, so the doctor turned his face to the wall, but Claudine did not look away, and the bolt of pain that passed between them was like thunder.

  That handless woman stayed in her case all through her days because she could no longer do anything. Claudine persuaded Arnaud to take a girl out of the cane field to care for her in the daytime. Also she had made a wooden hook and a spoon to be fastened to those stumps, so that the woman could help herself a little. After Claudine had done those things, some of the other people began to meet her eyes more freely when she looked at them, and some of them would shyly touch her hands, although they were still fearful of her spirit.

  On the fifth night that we stayed there one of my soldiers forced a woman from the plantation to open her legs for him, and I ordered him to be shot. There was nothing else to do about it. By dawn a great stir had begun among the woman’s family and spread all through Arnaud’s cultivators, and they would have risen against us if the man had not been punished. I shot him myself with my own pistol, but left it to others to bring his flesh to the cemetery. It was what Toussaint would have wanted and what he would have done, the same as if Toussaint himself were working through my hands, and in fact he told me so himself when I reported it to him. After this had been done, the people became calm again, and they went quietly back to work—too quietly.

  I wondered if
perhaps Arnaud practiced his old cruelties on them when no one else was there to see, but I learned from the people that this was not true. This I found out mostly from Bouquart, because he had taken up with a woman there, who gave herself to him freely, and that was a good way of getting the news. I teased him about Zabeth at Ennery, but there was not much heart in my teasing. Bouquart told me that the people were not downhearted for anything Arnaud had done to them, but because of Toussaint who had ordered that any man not in the army must work and stay on the land he worked for his whole life long, or else be punished by the soldiers with their guns. Also Toussaint had taken away many of the Sonthonax guns from the men who worked the land, saying he would return them if there was need to use them. No one said it was like slavery again, the way they had spoken about Hédouville, but I could feel them thinking so, although they would not say it to my face.

  Bouquart was always away with his new woman at night, so I was alone in the case. I did not like this, and often I could not sleep. One night I rose as if a voice had called me and walked around the cane mill to the open yard before the grand’case. The moon was two days past the full, and in the light of it Claudine came drifting from the house and stopped in the burnt circle of the shed where Arnaud had once kept his slave-catching dog which the doctor had shot, and where later Claudine had murdered the maid named Mouche. She turned within the walls which were burned down, turning and turning under the moon.

  From the shadow of the mill wall, I watched her. Arnaud was watching too, from a seat on the gallery of the grand’case. He sat very still—only the pommel of his twisted stick kept falling from one of his hands to the other. It made me uneasy to think that he probably saw me too, inside the shadow of the wall. Riau had more power than Arnaud then, but for that moment I did not quite believe it.

  After a while I saw that someone else was watching too, a woman who stood inside a fringe of trees, across the clearing from the mill. I went to where she was standing, exposed to Arnaud’s eyes under the moon, though he made no sign that he had noticed me. The woman was Cléo, a mulattress who had been housekeeper here. I had known her in the camps of Grande Riviere, where she had run after Claudine slashed the throat of Mouche in the shed. It was Cléo who told me all that story.